Can someone help me with finding a set of donor heads for a Toshiba 2.5" drive? The model of the bad drive is:

MK4025GAS
HDD2190 F ZE01 T
Product of Philippines

I have several drives that are:

MK4025GAS
HDD2190 F ZK01 S
Product of China

Would the heads be compatible on these? Or because the country is different, do I need an exact match? I assume the Z*** number is the firmware revision right?

Thanks for the help.

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http://www.ancilesecurity.com

Heads should be a match. Toshiba fairly interchangable.

I agree, this combo has worked for me in the past. Wish all drives were as nice as those old toshibas

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Data Recovery Ireland

Awesome! Thanks, I will give them a try.

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http://www.ancilesecurity.com

I could not get these heads to work in my drive. I put them back in the original drive and they were fine, so I know the heads are good. However, when I put them in the bad drive, it just clicks and stays BSY when I power it in DeepSpar.

I imagine I would run into the same issue with a platter swap right?? Or is that an option before I try and find an exact match donor drive?

Thanks.

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I've found it best to match the last letter, ie T. It's been my observation that on many occasions heads from a higher letter are backward compatible with a lower letter but not the other way around. However, you didn't state what the original problem was with the drive. Toshibas often have spindle motor issues which may be confused with head issues.

AFAIK T designates Philippines & S China.

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Well in diagnosing the heads, here is what I did. I think it indicates a degraded head and not motor issues.

I don't have PC-3000, but I do have a DeepSpar Disk Imager. So I used DDI to build a head map of the drive, then ran the Media Test. Head 0 was all green. Head 1 was about 60% green, 30% read timeout, and 10% errors (UNC or AMNF).

I was able to image everything on Head 0 with no problem. I was imaging Head 1 using longer timeouts, but it was only imaging at about 1Kb/s in DDI. So I decided to try and repair the head issue so I could image it more quickly. At the rate it was going, it would have taken months.

I will try and find a donor drive that has the last letter matching and give that a try. Thanks!

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The most common problem with this series is bearing / lubrication failure. This often presents as runs of bad sectors in DDI.

Drives with this problem are often position sensitive. Try imaging it straight up and down, and if you can read over areas previously skipped, or if it goes faster, a platter swap may help.

Jono

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Thanks jono. As I understand it, I will still need an exact match to do a platter swap correct?

I can't put the platters into one of the drives listed above can I?

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http://www.ancilesecurity.com

Also, I thought the fact that the one head copied flawlessly helped rule out spindle/bearing issue, no?

I thought if it was a motor or bearing issue, I would have seen read errors on both heads.

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http://www.ancilesecurity.com

Your logic is good. I was just "playing the odds."

Look at the time domain of the imaging. If one head imaged flawlessly while another had errors SIMULTANEOUSLY, then that would rule out motor / bearing issues.

If, however, your one good head was imaged first and now everything else has problems, I would try repositioning the drive (a very simple test) and see if it picks up sectors that were previously rejected. Toshiba drives with motor / bearing problems tend to get worse over time, and rather quickly at that.

If the performance of the drive improves from repositioning, a motor swap is indicated. if not, you've got heads / media issues to deal with instead.

You don't need an exact model match for motor swapping.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

This is true, but for some odd reason we've had more success in using the T heads in the S drive than the other way round. Go figure.

Interesting........unfortuantely I have good S heads and was trying to use them in the T drive.

Good to know they may be compatible the other way if it ever comes up.

jono: good info, I always learn from your posts. I did image the drive all at once with the first pass and it imaged exactly half of the LBAs. That's when I went back and built the head map. (I know I shoulda done it first, but I am just learning). After that I imaged by head to make sure that I picked up all of Head 0 (and it had). Then imaged just by Head 1 and it read maybe 40% of the remaining LBAs (with longer timeout period set). I tried positioning it differently after your post, but that didn't seem to affect it at all.

I am going to try and find a good donor drive (if anyone has one, please pm me) and swap heads first. Then that way, if it turns out to not be a head, I can just put the heads back and swap platters into the new drive.

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